Research topics
Publication types
Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
Find out where you are in the income distribution.
ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy.
Reforming the tax system for the 21st century.
A peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing articles by academics and practitioners.
Resources for schools and students.
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ESRC Centre for Fiscal Policy
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Date started: 01 April 1991
Abstract: Research falls into several main areas: labour supply incentives and tax policy, the distribution of income and the structure of tax and social security; consumer demand and savings behaviour; company taxes; investment and research and development; European tax co- ordination, local government finance and environmental taxation. Apart from its research, the Centre promotes academic dialogue in its subject area, serves as a training forum and conveys findings to policy-makers with enough clarity to influence decisions. By organising conferences, providing a base for foreign visitors, the Centre strives to be a national resource in empirical microeconomic research.
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In this paper we examine the panel data estimation of dynamic models for count data that include correlated fixed effects and predetermined variables.
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This paper uses microeconomic data from the UK Family Expenditure Surveys (FES) and the General Household Surveys (GHS) to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages.
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One-and-a-half million pensioners are dependent on the minimum means-tested benefit, income support.
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The subsidy of childcare for pre-school-age children has moved rapidly up the political agenda in the UK, and government policy has developed considerably in this area.
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Non-domestic rates are a tax that is formally levied on the occupiers of nondomestic property in the United Kingdom.
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The 'traditional' view, in both educational and labour-market policy, of the transition from education to employment centres on the school-leaving decision - in other words, on a particular point in time when the individual concerned decides to leave full-time education and enter the labour market.
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This paper analyses the effect on the capital stock and growth rate of policies that allow banks to have monopoly power.
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The paper compares the change in pension plan coverage in the 1980s in the US and the UK.
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A model is developed that allows for a layoff rate and a job arrival rate in the intertemporal choice of consumption and labor market state.
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This report studies the demand for private health insurance in the UK using data from the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey.
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This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual price of new goods and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using non-parametric expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods changes between periods.
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The late 1980s saw a dramatic fall in personal saving rates in Britain and the United States which attracted the attention of academics and policymakers alike.
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In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.
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The analysis of the expenditure decisions of English local authorities has assumed great importance as central government has sought to exercise increasing control over the activities of local government.
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Private pensions seem likely to provide the dominant source of income for the majority of retired workers in the future.
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The tax treatment of company dividend payments is an area where corporate taxation interacts with the personal income tax.
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The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.
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Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.
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A long-standing concern surrounding the performance of the UK economy is its perceived failure to maintain the same technological pace as its competitors.
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Taxes on alcohol are among the oldest in the UK and are still an important source of tax revenue.
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This study is based on a new data source, the BHPS, which allows researchers to follow the fortunes of the same households from one year to the next. It finds that the poorest tenth of households in 1992 were on average around 3% worse off in real terms than the poorest tenth in 1991, but that this result was mainly attributable to previously non-poor households becoming worse off.
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A new procedure for measuring horizontal inequity and vertical equity in the income tax is proposed, for which the "equals" under the tax law are socioeconomic groups, and the equal treatment norm is a command that, for equity, these groups should face the same tax schedule.
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This paper compares the employment behaviour of innovative firms with those that are less technologically advanced.
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This paper develops a new separability concept - latent separability.
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We study transitions in and out of work for men over the age of forty in order to investigate the principal determinants of retirement age.
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This paper estimates the impact of schooling on the wages of men.
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This paper aims to investigate the impact of the UK Family Credit (FC) scheme (an in-work income transfer programme, i.e. one which is only payable to individuals who are in work) on the labour supply of lone mothers.
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In this paper we consider estimation of the autoregressive error components model.
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Our paper evaluates the labour supply effects of 'in work' benefit reforms in the UK, using the means-tested benefit reforms of July 1995 as an example.
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We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.
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In this paper we use household level data on income and expenditure to analyse the importance of precautionary saving in the UK.
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Inequality of post-tax income among pre-tax equals is evaluated and aggregated to form a global index of horizontal inequity in the income tax.
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This paper contrasts Samuelson's (1964) definition of "true economic depreciation" with the use of this term that has become standard in the more recent literature on neutral business taxes.
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In this paper we examine the concept of intergenerational mobility in earnings and in lifetime or 'permanent' status, and discuss its measurement using regression and quantile transition matrix approaches.
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The study, using the 1988-89 Retirement Survey in Britain: (i) estimates expenditure on housing relative to income for the sample aged 55-69, (ii) simulates optimal housing/consumption allocations for a simple life cycle model and (iii) examines the relationship between 'excess' holdings of housing, financial dissaving and other portfolio behaviour subsequent to retirement.
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The purpose of this working paper is to document the current TAXBEN model, given the changes that have occurred since 1990.
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The consumption of utilities (for example, energy and water), along with that of other goods such as food, clothing, shelter, health and education, is often thought of as something that has particular distributional significance.
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This report considers the issues involved in using sales taxes as a possible source of local government revenues in the UK.
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The Green Budget outlines the macroeconomic background, assesses the fiscal stance, and then considers a wide range of tax and spending issues that will be on the Chancellor's pre-budget agenda.
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It is 20 years ago this July that the committee under the chairmanship of James Meade was set up by the Institute for Fiscal Studies to take a fundamental look at the UK tax structure.
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The gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically over the last 25 years and the incomes of the bottom 10 per cent were no higher in 1991 than in 1967.
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This article describes the changing patterns in income inequality and real living standards over the last 30 years.
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The aim of this paper is to characterize the empirical implications for dynamic investment models of the hierarchy of finance model of corporate finance and to test these implications using firm level data.
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The only circumstance under which one can speak accurately about the cost-of-living index is one in which household expenditure patterns do not vary.
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Very little is known about how households hold their savings, if they have any at all. This study shows how the amount and nature of household saving and wealth vary across different household types.
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Measures of average inflation like the RPI cannot, by definition, capture the true cost-of-living increases faced by individual households. This report looks at the extent to which a range of households have had different experiences of inflation over the last 15 years.
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The government’s overhaul of the direct tax system, including the 1984 reforms to the Corporation Tax, the introduction of Independent Taxation and in 1993, the introduction of ‘pay and file’ for companies, has so far left the taxation of the self-employed relatively untouched.
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Barring any very unexpected developments, next month’s Budget Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be the last such speech to occur in March for the foreseeable future (and perhaps for ever) in the UK.
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There are many areas of the tax system in which substantial concessions are made, or appear to be made, to certain forms of activity.
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This paper sets out to explore theoretically how a change in the distribution of disposable income affects the market demand for a good or service.
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The purpose of this Commentary is to evaluate the merits of different methods of measuring low income, and to comment on the results of two main sets of UK low income statistics.
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Social security spending accounts for almost 30 per cent of public expenditure and is projected to reach £74.7 billion in 1992–93.
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The Ruding Committee began work in January 1991 on three questions posed by the European Commission:
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Social security payments are typically thought of as being aimed at those who are not in paid work, whether because of age, ill health, caring responsibilities or involuntary unemployment
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From April 1988, individuals were offered a new pensions option by the Government: the possibility of 'contracting out' of the State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) into an Approved Personal Pension.
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Although it is nearly two years since the Government reformed the system of local business rates to introduce a uniform business rate, the debate still continues over the merits of the new system.
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This Commentary looks at the options open to the Chancellor in the Budget.
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The annual exercise of revising excise duties has become part of Budget Day tradition.
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Social security systems in developed countries are typically the largest single item of public expenditure, and affect virtually every member of the population at some point, whether through universal benefits to children, benefits to the elderly, benefits for the unemployed or sick, or simply payments to those on low income.
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